Star Wars_ Millennium Falcon - James Luceno [17]
In numerous accounts by pilots who had flown the YT-1300, the freighter was alternately praised for her speed and maneuverability and condemned for her quirkiness and unreliability. Often the pilots employed terms more suited to describing the personality of a sentient being than to evaluating a ship's performance. As her several names suggested, the YT was obedient or willful, a joy to pilot or a demanding demon, a savior or a troublemaker. Where Corell's Pride had “heart,” Fickle Flyer had “issues.” Meetyl's Misery was a constant source of despair. Entry after entry detailed accounts of dazzling maneuvers, close calls, or unexpected and often baffling breakdowns. “Made the run to Tralus in record time …,” one pilot recorded. Another said: “Marooned five hundred k from Selonia with a load of defrosting plak fish …” “Beat the Fusion Flame hands down in a race around Drall …” “Unable to launch from Centerpoint …”
So went the litany of testimonials and denunciations, with each instance of malfunction ending in makeshift repairs and retrofits, almost as if everyone had agreed to make the ship the subject of an ongoing experiment in improvised engineering.
To satisfy his curiosity, Bammy searched out the shoddy pulse generator a pilot had been forced to install; the place where a navigator had taken out his frustration on the Fabritech transceiver relay with a hydrospanner. He found dozens of areas where the ship had been similarly bruised and battered. A few pilots had gone so far as to scratch or torch epithets on the bulkheads or in the maintenance access crawl spaces.
The ship's history was equally eccentric.
For most of the dozen years that CI Limited had owned the YT, the company enjoyed continued growth and placed high on the list of the top investment opportunities in the Corellian system. Then business began to take a dive, thanks in part to actions by the monopolistic Trade Federation, which at the time had been devouring one small shipping concern after the next. Inaction by the complacent Republic Senate hadn't helped. In the years before Chancellor Valorum's first term of office, CI Limited's profits took a woeful slide. Eventually forced to sell its fleet of swift ships at rock-bottom prices, the company fell into bankruptcy and finally went belly-up.
YT 492727ZED was one of the last ships to go, sold to an enterprising pair of freelance traders named Kal and Dova Brigger. Siblings, the Briggers renamed the ship Hardwired and for a brief period took over where CI had left off, moving whatever freight they could find between Corellia and other worlds. By Bammy's calculation, all their profits must have gone into upgrading the ship's hyperdrive, which had made for easier travel to Corellia's neighboring systems and, eventually, to the Core. The freight they carried began to change as well, from consumer goods to light arms, munitions, and similar contraband.
According to HoloNet entries, the Briggers' illicit dealings brought them to the attention of the Smugglers' Confederacy of the Cularin system, and ultimately to the attention of the organization's leader, Nirama, who loaned the siblings enough credits to have the YT further upgraded in exchange for their pledge to refrain from doing business with slavers. When after only a standard year the siblings reneged on the deal, Nirama put a price on their heads. Half the reward was collected by a celebrated bounty hunter who captured Dova and returned her to Nirama, who in turn had her executed.
Dova's surviving brother, Kal, renamed the YT Wayward Son, changed the registry to Fondor, and lit out for Thyferra, hoping to find work for Iaco Stark's Commercial Combine. A former smuggler himself, Stark headed up a group of pirates, bounty hunters, and assassins working the Rimma Trade Route, but he'd allowed his ambitions to get the better of him and found himself in the midst